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From: hua@netcom.com (Ernest Hua)
Subject: Re: Iomega QIC-80 + Dell XPS P90 + FreeBSD 1.1.5.1
Message-ID: <huaCyxuM3.Azp@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 1994 07:39:39 GMT
Lines: 50
Well, I solved the problem ... sort of ...
The for() loop at line 1447 in ft.c is way too fast on a P90. On a
486DX2-66, it appears to run slow enough to detect the tape drive, but
on a P90, the resulting timeout is too short.
The fix is to lengthen the for() loop to 100000 iterations (instead of
10000).
EDITORIAL: This is a butt-ugly to do timeout detection.
Is there any better way to do this?
(I have already reported the bug to the officials ...)
Ern
> I have a Dell Dimension XPS P90 PCI system with a 1.44M floppy. The
> floppy controller appears to be on-board. The setup menu appears to
> be able to do choose which physical drive appears as drive A: to the
> operating system. It appears to be able to fool FreeBSD as well as
> MS-DOS, so I suspect this is a hardware-based redirection, probably
> swapping the register windows at 0x3f8 and 0x2f8.
>
> My main problem is that a Conner QIC-80 tape drive worked with some
> other PC (a 486DX2-66 with the floppy controller on a BT445S SCSI
> controller), but it did not work with the Dell system. ("work" here
> means that FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 actually found the drive as ft0.) I gave
> up on the Conner and traded for an Iomega QIC-80 drive hoping that
> some funny drive select limitation was the problem with the Conner.
> Turns out, I was wrong. The Iomega is also invisible to FreeBSD.
>
> I should also point out that both drives worked with the software as
> delivered for DOS/Windows. Both drives were configured with the so-
> called "soft" drive select jumper. (When I tried configuring the
> Conner explicitly as drive 1 or as drive 2, it floppy would appear
> to be waking up at the same time as the tape drive. I suspect that
> there is some sort of conflict of drive address or something.)
>
> A interesting fact is that the Dell documentation warned that one
> should set the drive select to "DS4" and not "DS2" or "DS3". I did
> not do this because there was no way to do so in either tape drive.
>
> Anyone have a clue as to what is going on here?
>
> All comments or suggestions are welcome.
>
> Ernest Hua
> Xenon Microsystems
> hua@netcom.com